It’s not ready for prime time, or even worthy of regular television. But it’s a fine fit for online streaming.
Tonight, from 7 to 8, KATV and Talk Business and Politics will present a debate among the four Democratic candidates in the 2nd Congressional District seeking to face Republican U.S. Rep. French Hill in November.
You can watch at katv.com or on the station’s Facebook page. And you can watch via talkbusiness.net.
Democrats are encouraged by their special-election success elsewhere. Hill is thought possibly … possibly … to be vulnerable in the current climate in a district combining urban Democratic strength and normally greater suburban Republican strength.
If some Republicans are cool to the Donald Trump style, and if Democrats are indeed fired up … well, we’re getting ahead of ourselves considering that we haven’t yet made much if any acquaintance with the Democratic candidates. That can start to change this evening.
The competition will pit three unabashed progressives — high school teacher Paul Spencer, elementary teacher Gwen Combs, and Clinton School project director Jonathan Dunkley — against an establishment insider—lawyer and state legislator Clarke Tucker — who was aggressively recruited to run by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The Trump-resistant Democratic passion might work in a primary to the advantage of the unabashed progressives. The anti-insider sentiment might work to the detriment of an establishment insider favored out of Washington.
The question is whether tonight’s event will be three-against-one, or the three against each other to stand out and emerge as the option to the one — or, if an hour permits, both.
Either way, Tucker will be on his own as he seeks to present, probably in a defensive mode, a seamless primary-through-general election message. He wants to emphasize his strong record of state legislative accomplishment against simpler and probably more compelling passionate ideology.
He’ll probably respond to any criticisms of him by saying he is proud that some people seem to think he’s the right candidate to take on Hill.
The recent report in the New York Times that the national party favors Tucker would be a good thing in a conventional year. It’s not altogether a bad one even now.
But it provides an opening for the other candidates to say that national Democratic strategists are to blame in the first place for timid and out-of-touch tactics that conceded Arkansas to raging Republicanism.
If I were writing speeches for any of the three, I might hand in something like: “We in the 2nd District don’t need the Mark Pryor playbook or the Blanche Lincoln playbook or any dictates out of Washington. That’s a blueprint for 40 percent and two more years of French Hill excusing the inexcusable behavior of Donald Trump. We need to return to the winning Democratic ways of Vic Snyder, who had a simple strategy of his own that won in this district very recently. It was not dictated from Washington but born from within. It was to stand clearly for principle and plainly say so.”
The downside is that there can’t be three winning Vic Snyders in a single Democratic primary.
I’m probably overselling the effect of a 60-minute exercise in online streaming. But I’d argue I’ve properly set up the broader dynamic of the race.
In terms of a specific policy issue, look tonight for the one that all four candidates emphasize as the biggest or near-biggest. That’s health care.
Here’s how the broader dynamic applies on that issue: Spencer, Combs and Dunkley all call for Medicare for all, or, by another name, single-payer government health insurance. Tucker, as yet, has emphasized a need to change Obamacare to make it work better and more affordably.
So, again, you have three candidates with simple and easy rhetoric popular in a primary but problematic in a general election, at least in the conservative Republican suburbs. Then you have one candidate presumably trying to finesse with nuance and adhere to a seamless primary-to-election message.
It’s three Bernies versus a single Hillary, in a way.
I still think I’d rather be Tucker in the primary. But I’d probably rather be one of the other three tonight.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.